My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.

And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the readers opportunities to follow it at every step.

Let them impeach and be damned.

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice.

I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.

I'm aware that a lot of what is happening in jazz has not had a very dynamic change in a long time.

Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.

If we would know whether our faith is genuine, we do well to ask ourselves how we are living.

There are truths which can kill a nation.

Finally it may be said that the temple endowment is not secret. All who meet the requirements for entrance to the temple may enjoy it.

Trade is a social act.